A significant amount of content is stored in document repositories. The access and manipulation of this content is typically restricted using various types of access control mechanisms. In conventional systems, accessing content in a content repository may be a two-stage process. In the first stage, all documents matching a query issued by a user may be obtained. In a second stage, access control mechanisms may be applied to the retrieved documents in order to identify only the documents that the user is permitted to access. This limited set of documents is then provided to the user. This two-stage process introduces a significant amount of latency in the retrieval of content from the document repositories.